3 How-To Tips to Measure Your Social Media Marketing Services

Success with social media marketing services hinges on effective budget allocation and marketing mix decision making. Practitioners and executives must be able to identify the marketing campaigns and assets that help drive the business' top and bottom lines, and invest in and optimize them accordingly. This of course requires access to comprehensive, granular, and accurate web analytics data with which marketers can measure campaign performance and understand the complex website behaviors of prospects and customers.

Performance measurements should not occur solely within the confines of individual channels and campaigns. The best online marketers measure performance and ROI in a comprehensive view that comprises all online channels, be they new media, paid and natural search, email marketing, or display ads. That holistic perspective equips you with the insights needed to launch your best campaigns across the best channels based on the unique drivers of your business.

Marketers do recognize the need to better measure social media marketing performance. In fact, 81% of Senior marketers and Chief Marketing Officers hope in 2010 to measure social media investments by quantifiable, bottom-line data-by revenue, conversion, and average order value. That's a change from a 2009 focus on such web-centric metrics as site traffic, page views, and numbers of fans.

Yet, analytics are still the biggest marketing challenge. CMOs say they need to know how to start measuring social media's impact, how to understand who they're reaching, and where social media fits within the overall marketing mix.

Success in online marketing requires having access to and continuous use of a robust analytics solution that can uncover the total impact that such investments make on the business. Such a solution must expose data that practitioners and executives care about; namely, the metrics that show how social media investments impact the business' top and bottom line. The solution should allow marketers to compare new media ROI to the performance of mainstream online channels. The next section details the capabilities that reliable and comprehensive media analytics must have.

3 Keys to Measuring Your Social Media Marketing Services Success

Analytics helps marketers precisely measure the performance of all online marketing assets and campaigns that generate both direct and indirect traffic to the main website, and assess the ROI of social marketing against other online marketing channels. Keys to new media analytics success are the following capabilities:

Attribute relative credit to social investments for influencing customer acquisition, persuasion, and conversion
Compare the direct traffic generated by social media to direct traffic from campaigns of mainstream online channels Understand the total impact that social media investments have on the business from both direct traffic (click-through) and indirect traffic (view-through) perspectives
Compare the view-through/click-through performance of social sites against other impression-based campaigns, such as syndicated video, blogs, microsites, and display ads Let's look at each of these capabilities in more detail.

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If you are a business owner trying to understand the keys to improving your social media marketing, hiring a competent and credentialed Hubspot search engine marketing management consultant is one way to save you critical time and effort, which you could apply to furthering your vital business processes.

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David Hale, is the CEO & Founder of DHI-Communications, a full-time Inbound marketing consultancy specializing in assisting businesses with harnessing the awesome power of search engine marketing to dramatically increase their online visibility, generate greater site traffic and how to convert subscribers to paying customers.

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10 Reasons Why You Should Outsource Social Media Optimization Services

Today, Internet is one of the widely used marketing arenas. Social Media Optimization services help you with well developed marketing strategies using social media websites. Today, SMM (Social Media Marketing) has become a part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This type of Internet marketing is a part of SEO service as they have same contribution to a website in search engine rankings. Therefore, there are many reasons behind outsourcing social media optimization services.

1) Link Building: Media Websites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Squidoo help in promoting your content over the Internet. Communities in websites like Facebook, Orkut have features of making comments and forums. Proper use of keywords from content is one of the main features of Search engine Optimization. All of the above are parts of Social Media Marketing.

2) Blog Submission: Search engines are undoubtedly a considerable boost that results from Social Media Optimization. This wide impact of SMM on SEO has many worthy reasons that prove their benefits.

3) Quality and Relevant Links: The Search engine ranking of a website is the prior aspect that brings traffic to its visitors. SMM is a way that enhances your search engine rankings. Organic links from Media websites deliver a lot of traffic to your website. These links can neither be bought nor can they be reciprocated.

4) Social Media Marketing: When your website gets linked by another well known website on the Internet, both visitors and search engines give preference to that. A certain amount of traffic from well known websites get delivered to your website via links. Search engine algorithms also track this and increase ranking based on this very concept.

5) Getting notified by social Media Websites: Targeting at specific keywords via media websites are more effective as they target more visitors. Better specified keywords can also help you geo target visitors. Social Media websites are places where people visit often during their leisure time. So, you can expect longer visits from them on your websites.

6) Video Promotions: Catchy Videos promoting your website spread the word more effectively. It might not help you rank your website but it definitely brings targeted visitors to your website. These new dimensions help new websites increase their visibility and in a faster and effective way.

7) Picture Promotions: This is quite similar to Video promotions. The difference lies here that as compared to videos, people see pictures at a glance and their attention is diverted if it is a wonderful one. The watermark along with the hyperlink would definitely attract more visitors.

8) Links from Search engine Crawlers: Newly added social media is often crawled by search engines. Therefore, links from these newly posts are directed to your website.

9) Viral Marketing: Viral Marketing by social media optimization services is another effective way of Internet marketing. It is a way of marketing in which visitors spread the word themselves, by their own will.

10) Free E-Books: This marketing is generally done in the form of some free e-books. The word you want to spread is induced in the free product. People download it, share it and the product gets spread along with your ad on it. It must be catchy which people would love to read and share.

There may be an adverse affect of social media marketing. Rivals can take various strategies to influence your reputation negatively.
So, you should be very careful about such factors and select your social media optimization services and social media marketing services with patience

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The 8 Reasons to Use a Media Buying Services Agency

More often than not, new advertisers will set up their own ad buys and handle the media buying themselves. While this might be a wonderful educational experience, it is usually a big mistake, costing the company time, money and marketing results. Even if your company has experience in buying media, it would be wise to consider the following eight reasons for working with a professional media buying services agency.

1. It Costs Nothing

When you use a media buying services agency to buy your company's radio and television advertising, the agency is paid through an agency-only discount provided by the station. For example, let's say you want to buy an ad spot that costs $1000. If you work directly with the media station sales rep, that spot costs $1000. If you work with a media buying agency, that spot still costs $1000. Why? Because television stations give the media buyer a discount (usually 15%). This discount is not available to your company; only an established media buying agency is eligible to receive it. Your company pays the exact same amount, and your media buying services agency does the work, paid for by the station.

In our example, it might seem like overkill to introduce a buyer into the mix. If you were buying a limited run on a single station, you could probably do it yourself. On the other hand, longer runs or ads running on more than one station are much more complex. As a matter of fact, as you read on, you will find that not only does using a media buyer not cost anything, it actually stretches your ad budget to help you get a lot more for your advertising dollar.

2. Negotiation "Clout"

Media buying services agencies often have quite a bit of buying influence - in both local and national markets. Professional media buying agencies place advertising for several clients, giving them a total spend much larger than a single company might bring to the table. As you might guess, this level of spending gives them some real advantages when negotiating contracts. Your advertising schedule will benefit with lower prices per spot and better timeslots.

3. Negotiation Know-How

Professional media buyers will tell you that negotiating media buys is often more art than science. A really good buyer truly understands the stations being bought, knows how to reach a compromise that helps your company as well as the station and understands the tricks and traps that could cause problems with the buy.

Here's an example: For one reason or another, television stations often "bump" spots (remove them from the schedule). If your negotiated price is below a certain threshold, your spots have a high likelihood of being bumped instead of another advertiser who is paying higher. The professional media buyer understands this and knows how to prevent this problem.

4. Tracking & "Make-Good" Ads

When you buy television advertising, your cost is based on the station's promise that a certain number of people will see your spot. What happens if they don't? Let's say they promise a million viewers but only half that number tune in (something that happens quite often). What then? Think the station will track you down and let you know it happened, then offer some way to make up for it? Not likely.

A professional media buyer tracks the ratings for your advertising to make sure you get everything that you paid for. In the case above, your media buyer will request "make goods," essentially free spots to make up for the ratings difference. This is huge benefit that will save your budget while also increasing delivery of your message. (For example, in 2008, we tracked a more than 20% under-delivery in one of our markets, saving our clients hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

5. No More Sales Hassles

Your media buying services agency becomes the point of contact for all media reps - those working with your company and those who want to. You're never stuck on the phone discussing "special advertising prices" or "one-day deals" again.

For one of our clients, this was by far his top benefit - even more than the money he saves, he enjoys the ability to tell media reps that he has a media agency and they should call us instead of him.

6. No More Accounting Hassles

No matter how hard you plan, television advertising billing fluctuates and is sometimes incorrect. This due to programming changes, scheduling adjustments and numerous other reasons. Within a media buying services company, you have an accountant that is accustomed to working with television stations to make sure that budgets are kept. This helps you avoid surprises in billing, and it gives you piece of mind that your invoices are correct.

7. More Time In Your Day

If you take away all of the accounting hassles, calls from sales reps, research into shows and networks, and all of the other miscellaneous work that goes into good media buying, then you can save lots of time. If you've worked with a media buying services agency, you know that working with one contact and company saves tons of time over placing on multiple media outlets.

8. Big-Picture Strategy

One of the biggest benefits of working with a media buyer is that they can often see the big picture in a way that the individual sales reps cannot. Your professional media buyer knows your target customers as well as all of your placements and all of your marketing goals. Instead of ordering media based on a station's open inventory (what TV stations call their commercial slots), a professional buy is based on getting you what you need at the best prices available.

John T. Mims, APR, is a senior partner with Altyris, a full-service advertising and public relations agency located in High Point, NC. For more information about Altyris and their media buying services, visit http://www.altyris.com.

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